Updates and Announcements on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap (January continued)

It’s been another busy couple of weeks in the Message Centre and on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

First up, two items that were added to the roadmap on Friday and are already rolling out, possibly even launched by the time you read this (and depending upon your Office 365 ProPlus release channel and build number).

Saving documents to the Cloud just got easier

New capabilities have been announced that makes it easier to create and save Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents directly to the cloud.

A new dialog box will default to OneDrive or SharePoint Online allowing end users to quickly save documents in their preferred location. Exciting stuff.

For the forgetful among us, if you overlook saving a new document before exiting, you will also see this updated save experience.

Microsoft have said that this should begin to start rolling out in early February with a view of full rollout by the middle of 2019. Here’s some handy documentation around how you can save your files to the cloud more easily.

Flow generates tenant-shareable links

Next, we move on to some announcements in the world of (work)Flow. With this Microsoft 365 roadmap item, Flow can be used to automatically generate a shareable link to content. This link can then be used in approvals, automated communications and more.

I wish I could tell you more…but that’s all I’ve seen on this one to date (i.e. since Friday, 25th Jan!).

Further information now available on Modern SharePoint Online enhancements

Last week also saw further ‘modernisation’ feature updates coming to SharePoint online in Q1 2019. Some highlights we’ve picked out:

Bulk check in/out – coming Feb 2019

Signals – new visual clues about the status of a file – coming Feb 2019

Sticky Headers – SharePoint will keep the column headers pinned at the top of scrolling windows – coming Mar 2019

Safe to say Microsoft are committed to bringing SharePoint into the 21st Century. I think what’s interesting to note here is the relatively short lead time between announcement of the new features and their expected release dates – Jan 19 through to Mar 19.

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